Searching Britannica Image Quest will lead you to millions of rights-cleared images.
Standard Search:
1. Type a word or phrase in the search box found at the top of every page of Britannica Image Quest.
2. Click the Search icon to begin the search. Image titles, captions, credits, and keywords will be searched.
3. All images in the Image Quest database that meet match your search word(s) or phrase will be displayed.
4. To scroll through the pages of the search results, click the page numbers in the lower right of the screen or click the forward and back arrows. You can change the number of images to display on each page by selecting 15, 50, or 100 in the lower left of the screen. You can also click on an image to view a larger version.
5. To view more info about an image, click the image title or the “More Info” icon.
Search Tips:
Featured Searches and Images
To help get you started, on the home page we have included some popular searches and images.
Filtering Your Search
If your search produces too many results and you want to narrow it down, you can select to search only in a particular subject area or within a certain collection by using the two pull-menus to the left of the search box. To learn more about the type of images each collection might include, view the Collection Profile Pages which can be accessed from the “See all collections” link on the home page.
Using Quotation Marks
Use quotation marks around words or phrases if you want them to appear word for word in your search results. For example, if you are interested in the American Civil War and you do not want to see results for other civil wars, type "American Civil War" in the Search Box. Only images that contain the phrase “American Civil War” will appear in your results.
Uppercase or Lowercase?
Type your search words in uppercase or lowercase -- it doesn't matter. Changing the case of the letters in your query will not affect search results in any way. For example, the word “AIDS” gives you the same results as the word “aids”.
Boolean Operators
You can use Search to construct complex queries that correspond to Boolean operators, including AND, OR, and NOT. You can also simply enter the operators as part of a query in any search box on the site.
AND: Use the AND operator (it must be in all capital letters) or “+” to specify that you want all of your search words to appear in the results: German AND shepherd.
OR: Use the OR operator (it must be in all capital letters) to receive search results that contain any one or all of the words in your multiple word query: Yugoslavia OR Bosnia.
NOT: Use the NOT operator (it must be in all capital letters) or “-” to exclude words from your search results: Washington NOT George.
You can use these three Boolean operators in any combination by breaking your query into a formula using parentheses.
EXAMPLE: cherokee AND (language OR alphabet) NOT sequoyah
This search finds results about the Cherokee language or alphabet, but not Sequoyah.